The huge old telly, an inept teacher… The lost ritual of watching TV at school

The memory of a strange ritual unites everybody who attended a British school from the 1960s to the 1990s. At least once a week, a huge television set – often a very old one – would be wheeled into the classroom on a squeaky trolley. The teacher would attempt to operate it and tune to the required channel, and would almost always fail and require assistance from a more technically minded pupil. Finally, just in time, the countdown clock, ticking down the seconds to transmission, would appear on the screen; for some reason, this always elicited an impromptu mime of a shooting gallery from the class, firing at the circular symbols around the clock face, with appropriate sound effects, as they disappeared. And then a programme “for schools and colleges” would begin.

Both the BBC and ITV had the requirement to provide educational programmes for schools written into their broadcasting licences. ITV had thrown this over to Channel 4 by the 1990s before the internet age rendered the enterprise obsolete in the new century. The BBC switched its schools remit to its – still thriving – Bitesize arm around the same time.

But for a good 40 years, much of the daytime schedule consisted of schools programmes. Who would want to watch television during the day, after all? And particularly in the morning – that would be unthinkable. Turning on the TV at breakfast time in the 1970s, you’d usually be confronted by an Open University presentation; often a heavily bearded man from 1969 scribbling very complicated equations on to a white board and muttering about vectors and scalars and proving the law of the conservation of momentum. I’m not entirely sure that this wasn’t a better way to start the day than with Susanna Reid and Ed Balls.

There was something almost exciting about watching television at school. It felt like a treat, invoking a holiday feeling, even if the fare on offer could be rather dry. The addition of videocassette recorders into the mix in the late 1970s and early 1980s added a new dimension of fun to the ritual. Just when teachers had learnt to tame the television set, a new device appeared to fox them, enmeshing them in jammed-up tape and tangles of Scart leads. I had a geography teacher who was an eminently practical, hands-on type, a fixer of tractor engines on her farm, who flinched from the school VCR as if it were the console layout of an Apollo module.

The two programmes that stick in my mind from my schooldays are the BBC’s It’s Maths! and ITV’s How We Used to Live. It’s Maths! (1977) – that exclamation mark was a nice try but wasn’t exciting anybody – featured two chirpy young actors-turned-presenters, David Warwick and Elaine Donnelly. The conceit of the thing was that they had been charged, for some never-explained reason, with tidying the BBC’s cavernous scenery and props store. (Perhaps they had offended the director-general or let their Equity subs lapse.) Every problem they encountered in this task, they found, could be solved with maths (or rather, Maths!). This made them seem peculiarly single-minded. You began to suspect that they couldn’t make a cup of tea without first calculating the volume of the water and the gradient of the kettle. I think this show lingers in my mind because the background was interesting. You could spot various famous items – the Tardis, Terry and June’s sofa, the robot from Rentaghost – in the vast hangar they had been condemned to, a sort of Area 51 of the BBC.

How We Used to Live ran for an incredible stretch, from 1968 to 2002, with each series consisting of family dramas set in particular periods of British history, written with fluency and soapy spirit by Freda Kelsall. The series I recall particularly was set in a Yorkshire mill town in the 1870s, and contrasted the lives of the posh Hughes family and the impoverished Fairhursts. Watching it again now, I am impressed by its sturdy production values and mature tone; the series was rightly showered with awards. But I’m afraid that at the time, it inspired in my class a craze for doing the accents, wringing imaginary flat caps while giving imitative cries of “Don’t send us t’ t’ work ’ouse”. It also suffers from the bane of most historical TV: a character who represents the viewers’ modern beliefs.

Other strong contenders included Picture Box, an anthology of imported short films that sticks in the memory mainly because of its deeply uncanny title sequence and theme tune, Manège, a piece of experimental music created using blown glass oscillations by French avant-garde composer Jacques Lasry. Then there was Look and Read, for primary school age, hosted by disembodied entity Wordy, parts of which featured serial dramas that were often unintentionally terrifying. Very often, adults just don’t seem to understand what actually scares children. “The Boy From Space” features an eerie alien “stranger” – just actor John Woodnutt in an old raincoat and silver face paint – who traumatised a generation.

Looser-than-normal contracts meant that certain schools programmes were repeated again and again. I feel as if I saw Good Health, an exhortation to keep fit, hundreds of times. The episode that features a manic craze for “Block-A-Boots” – a dread warning about the deleterious effects of glam-rock platform shoes – was running well into the 1980s, after the issue had become much less urgent.

The dated nature of these often-repeated old shows added to their strangely timeless quality. Children feel the passing of time so much more keenly than adults; to a child, a month can feel like a geological epoch. To an 11-year-old in 1979, 1971 felt more distant and more lost than the Victorian mills.

Schools TV was also, perversely, your companion on the days that you called in sick from school (whether genuinely, or more likely simply because you felt like it). You had to keep your story straight, after all, and could hardly be spotted frolicking in the streets. A “sick” day off school was a strange, otherworldly interlude. Even today, just hearing the theme tunes of shows such as My World or Stop, Look, Listen returns me to that half-awake, dissociated, pyjamas-all-day, “Have I got away with it?” state.

However, confronted by setting up a new Oled TV recently, and flustered by QR codes and voice prompts, I realised that I am now, in fact, the superannuated, hapless teacher from that strange, now lost ritual.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]